Zahran Alloush

Zahran Alloush (1971-25 December 2015) was the founder of Jaysh al-Islam and the military chief of the Islamic Front, serving as a major Islamist leader during the Syrian Civil War.

Biography
Zahran Alloush was born in 1971 in Douma, Damascus to a family of Sunni Muslim Syrians. He adhered to strict Islamism due to his father being a Salafist preacher and had three wives; Alloush gained a degree in sharia law at the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia. In 2009 he was arrested for possessing weapons and held at Sednaya prison with several other Islamist prisoners of the secular Syrian Arab Republic, but three months into the Syrian Civil War in 2011 he was released in a general amnesty. In 2011 he founded Jaysh al-Islam, a major Islamist rebel group that became a faction of the Islamic Front, of which he became military chief. He called for the extermination of Shi'ites and Alawites in the Levant, and he was known to be an extreme leader. However, he still gained support from the United States despite his terrorist views.

Alloush was the strongest Syrian Opposition leader by late 2015, as the Islamic Front surpassed the Free Syrian Army as the main Syrian Opposition faction. Alloush was supported by Turkey, where he met with other rebel leaders in April 2015, and he also announced his group's support for Turkey against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). On Christmas Day in 2015, Alloush was killed in an airstrike in the Damascus suburb of Otaya in a Russian Air Force airstrike, severely weakening the rebels.